Connie Francis

Connie Francis (12 December 1938-) was an Italian-American pop singer from the late 1950s and early 1960s. She was born Concetta Rosa Maria Franconero in the Ironbound section of Newark, New Jersey in 1938, and she became fluent in Yiddish due to growing up in an Italian-Jewish neighborhood. She went to high school in Belleville, and she became a pop singer in the late 1950s and early 1960s, and she was an international recording star from 1959 to 1973. After being raped in 1974, she fell into depression, and she completely lost her voice after nose surgery in 1977. She returned to the recording studio in 1978, but tragedy struck again when her brother was murdered by the Mafia in 1981. She would eventually recover from a steep depression caused by many tragedies, and, in 2007, her concert at the Castro Theatre in San Francisco was sold-out. Connie Francis was a notable Republican celebrity, recording a TV ad for 1968 presidential candidate Richard Nixon and serving as the head of Ronald Reagan's task force on violent crime.